The Bactra Review: Occasional and eclectic book reviews by Cosma Shalizi 49
The White Castle
by Orhan Pamuk
Trans. from the Turkish Beyaz Kale by Victoria Holbrook
NY: Vintage, 1998
The White Castle is a short, dialogue-free novel about
modernization and its ironies. The narrator is a young Venetian scholar and
engineer who, sometime in the early 17th century, is captured by the Turks and
taken to Istanbul, where he becomes the slave of an extremely minor Turkish
courtier called Hoja (``teacher'' or ``master''). Hoja is obsessed with
restoring the superiority of the Ottoman Empire over the Europeans by mastering
their science; he is also our unnamed narrator's exact physical double. Hoja
forces the narrator to teach him science --- which he does, starting with the
true, i.e. the Ptolemaic, astronomy. (This is part of the whole
ironies-of-modernization schtick, but surely Hoja could have obtained a good Arabic copy of
the Almagest easily enough.) From there they proceed to the
construction of orreries, musings on weapons on mass destruction, fireworks for
the infant Sultan, and the head-games and mutual moral abuse which occupy the
core of the novel. This is compelling reading, but unpleasant nonetheless, and
the arrival of the plague, which is, perhaps, halted by public health measures instituted by the narrator
and Hoja comes as a relief, the piles of dead bodies lightening the
atmosphere immeasurably. There follows a set piece on the decadence of courts,
and finally an opportunity for Hoja to put his ideas into practice, in the form
of a weapon to be employed against the Poles, and the eponymous White Castle.
It is hardly a spoiler to say that it proves a dismal failure, provoking
reverses in fortune all around.
I didn't enjoy The White Castle very much, but that was because
Pamuk succeeded all too well in evoking the miasma of frustration, delay,
claustrophobia, irrelevance and futility in which his characters live and move
and have their being. It is, indeed, extremely good at what it sets out to do,
and simply ignores what is beside its task. (Hence one gets absolutely no feel
at all for Istanbul, despite its being one of the most tempting locales in the
world for a writer of fiction to exploit.) Hoja and the narrator spend a lot
of their time trying to get inside each others heads and/or drive each other
crazy and/or exchange places, which is supposed to complement the
East-meets-West theme, but the mind-games are so much more vivid than the
latter that they completely overpower it. This is perhaps just as well, since
the whole ironies of modernization business is much too facile, and leaves out
the fact that, in the long run, Hoja was absolutely right: the Ottomans lost
first superiority over and then equality to the Europeans because they did not
master or match the Europeans in their new sciences and practical techniques;
Pamuk would have had a very different story had the narrator been the pupil of
Prof. Galilei of Padua. Still, the head-games left a sour taste in my mouth.
(The White Castle displays nothing resembling a sense of humor,
and next to no descriptions of nature, which makes me wonder what the
blurb-writers who compared Pamuk to Italo Calvino were smoking.) Pamuk
actually compelled me to keep reading, despite my distaste, which is
accomplishment enough that I will certainly read any of his other novels that
come my way.
161 pp.
Fiction /
Historical Fiction /
Islam and the Islamic World
Currently in print as a paperback, US$12, ISBN 0-375-70161-3. First
published in the United States, NY: George Braziller, 1991; in English,
Manchester: Carcanet Press, 1990; as Beyaz Kale, Istanbul: Can
Yayin Lari, 1985.
16 August 1998, slightly revised 25 August 1998